Back in the late 1990s, a number of advertising agencies (Poppe Tyson and ModemMedia being just two) extolled online marketing as uniquely capable of providing marketers with a method to truly personalize presentations of product promotional information for highly specific market segments. Poppe Tyson’s promotional literature talked about something called “the considered purchase”, meaning a type of lengthy consideration a certain cut of buyers will undertake to carefully study potential solutions to a burning need, and why online marketing was the perfect venue to provide these prospects with information tailored, specifically, to appeal to them, and them alone. The epitome of this notion is the concept of “Marketing 1to1”, which Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D, coined around the same time.

But now, in 2014, all of these notions may amount to little more than hyperbole, at least if an article titled How Facebook Sold You Krill Oil is credible. The article recounts the efforts of a Mr. Joao Rodrigues to determine if a marketing campaign on Facebook, which he has been considering for his product, something called Mega Red Fish Oil, would ” . . . help him find people who were already buying fish oil or other products that suggested they were concerned about the health of their hearts, and perhaps persuade them to switch to his brand.” (quoted directly from Mr. Goel’s article, as published on the New York Times web site)

As I read it, Mr. Rodrigues’ question is never directly answered by the team from Facebook, or the agency recommending the Facebook network of web sites as the perfect venue for Mr. Rodrigues to obtain the reach he required. But implicit to the rest of the article is the notion he cannot obtain those results, at least not through promoting his product on Facebook.

All of this should certainly be a big deal for anyone thinking about an investment in Facebook, or in any of its competitors. The enormous market capitalization each of these companies has achieved is built upon a set of assumptions likely to include a conviction they are uniquely capable of delivering a winning solution to Mr. Rodrigues’ requirement. If they are not able to deliver, as expected, and some significant portion of potential advertisers begin to realize this limitation, and opt for other methods, this same market capitalization may deflate very quickly.